I am working on providing Winboard with true Crazyhouse support, and am looking for people that are willing to test it. Send me a PM if you are interested!
It will look something like this:
The holdings are displayed by piece type, with a number next to it if there are multiple copies of that type. The pieces can be directly dragged into the board part of the display, but the old drop method, of right-clicking the drop square for a menu, will remain as well.
I just replaced the screeshot above by that for the latest version.
The promoted pieces are now clearly distinguishable from the original ones, but yet very similar in appearance. I might yet change the symbol for Queen to a narrower (3 or 4-pointed) Crown, as I don't like upside-down representations very much.
Looks interesting. Thanks for your work with these chess variants.
You may also consider to represent promoted pieces with the same shape as "normal" ones but with a common additional ornament - e.g. small red circle in a corner of a piece. You wouldn't have to invent a new shape for every new promoted piece but just mark it with a kind of flavour. Just an idea.
Yes, I did consider this. But the implementation was not so easy, as the different normal piece symbols leave room in different locations. So I probably still would have to make separate bitmaps for each promoted version. Furthermore, I Shogi the promoted piece also has to convey the information of what it originally was, rather than only the fact that it is promoted.
And I have many other piece symbols available anyway, for the fairy pieces in various other games. The roofed Rook symbol will be a nice representation of a Dragon King (to which a Rook in Shogi promotes), aka Crowned Rook (moves as R+K), and for the promoted Bishop I borrowed the ArchBishop from Capablanca Chess, that I also will use for Dragon Horse in Shogi (although the latter moves as B+K in Shogi stead of B+N in Capablanca, and now like plain B in Crazyhouse). The promoted Knight is the Nightrider symbol. Only for Queen I did not have a suitable existing symbol (I tried Cannon, but it looks confusing). Of course people only promote to N and Q in Crazyhouse.
It turns out to be quite easy of just squeezing out the central spike of the Queen's bitmap in Paint, by moving the right and left two spikes closer together. I will implement that tonight.
So far I don't like the representation of promoted pieces, they get distracting as for moments I am wondering how the piece moves only to remember that it moves the same but it's represented differently. My suggestion is still to show a slightly smaller version of the piece (Like the queen from the Petite Board representing a promoted pawn to queen on the Middling board, you would just need to pick this bitmap and center it on the bigger square).
As of now, dropping pawns on the first and last rank is possible, and that is against the rules.
Your beliefs create your reality, so be careful what you wish for.
I guess you are right, as indeed I used symbols that usually do represent pieces that move differently (Nightrider, Archbishop, Dragon King, Grasshopper).
Bitmaps for these symbols exist only in two sizes anyway (bulky and middling). For all other sizes I will load the two-steps-smaller size. Then people can chosse the representation by picking the size. Sizes can be varied in such small steps that it is not a big loss to ave to avoid one size because it has a representation that you happen to dislike.
The whole idea of Winboard_F is that one should define the piece representations through a font anyway.
I will also add the feature that you can change the letters used for the pieces in SAN and FEN, as different games have incompatible conventions. E.g. 'C' in Capablanca Chess means Chancellor, while in Xiangqi it means Cannon. The default now is that I use O for cannon, but this would be a great nuisance to Xiangqi players. (And there does exist a Xiangqi-playing WinBoard engine, the cousin of HoiChess, HoiXiangqi !) In Shogi the Ferz and Wazir are redefined as Silver and Gold Generals, and should be addressable as S and G, rather than F and W.
I guess I will let the variant determine which letters are the default, and undefine any pieces that do not belong in the variant. Any user-given piece designators will then override that.
Same for the board sizes: WinBoard_F wil know the default sizes of board and holdings for each variant, and use those if no explicit /boardWidth and /boardHeight are given. I will let /boardWidth-1 indicate the default size for the variant, and any number other than =1 will overrule the default.
If a variant is played with an overruled board size, WinBoard_F will prepend the board size before the variant name when sending the latter to the engine:
variant 8x8capablanca
would mean a game on a regular board where Pawns can also promote to Archbishop or Chancellor. The initial position in such non-standard variants would be an empty board, and you would have to paste in a FEN (or use the existing option /loadPositionFile="<name>" to have the opening FEN read automatically from a file) to play without an immediate stalemate message.
hgm wrote:The whole idea of Winboard_F is that one should define the piece representations through a font anyway.
I'd like a bitmap solution, because if I happen to invent a new variant for Winboard_F with new pieces, I could just create the pieces' bitmaps and tell Winboard to use them. I feel it would be a lot more harder to have to make a special font for this variant.
Other GUIs allow you to choose what bitmaps should represent each piece, having this feature would be useful for creating bitmap representation of new fairy pieces IMHO.
Your beliefs create your reality, so be careful what you wish for.
Ovyron wrote:I'd like a bitmap solution, because if I happen to invent a new variant for Winboard_F with new pieces, I could just create the pieces' bitmaps and tell Winboard to use them. I feel it would be a lot more harder to have to make a special font for this variant.
This is exactly how it doesn't work. If you want WinBoard to use another bitmap, you would have to provide that bitmap for every different board size you want to use it in, replace the old bitmaps by them or change the Winboard source to include the new bitmap files, and then recompile. For this you would have to download the sources, and possibly install cygwin and gcc. And to change back would be just as cumbersome.
With the font you would only have to redesign the character, and it would automatically work for all board sizes. To change back you simply select the old font.
